Elder Abuse - A Call for Culture Change

Culture change needed to protect the elderly, say MPs

By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 15 August 2007

Shocking levels of abuse, ill-treatment and neglect of elderly patients in hospitals and care homes are revealed in a damning report today.

An influential group of MPs and peers is demanding an "entire culture change" in health and care services and calls for tougher legislation to protect vulnerable pensioners.
They heard evidence of patients being poorly fed and dehydrated, given the wrong medicine, lacking privacy and even left lying in their own urine or excrement. Others were roughly handled by staff, deprived of their glasses, hearing aids or false teeth and discharged despite their frailty.

The Age Concern charity estimates that 500,000 older people in Britain suffer neglect or psychological, physical and financial abuse at any one time, although not all of this abuse occurs in health care. The elderly are the main users of the NHS, with two thirds of hospital beds occupied by people aged over 65.

The parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Human Rights condemns the Government's lack of "proper leadership" on the issue and points out that failing to counter the ill-treatment of older people could be a criminal offence. It says 21 per cent of care homes fail to reach minimum legal standards for privacy and dignity and says it found evidence of "historic and embedded ageism" within health care.

The committee says: "In our view, elder abuse is a serious and severe human rights abuse which is perpetrated on vulnerable older people who often depend on their abusers to provide them with care." It calls on the Government to place a duty on health and residential care providers to promote equality for older people, and to amend regulations so that all care homes are brought under the Human Rights Act. It also says that legislation banning age discrimination in the workplace should he extended to healthcare.

Andrew Dismore, the committee's Labour chairman, said the Human Rights Act had failed to eliminate the abuse. "It has become a tick-box exercise for lawyers, rather than becoming the lever to improve the delivery of services and in particular to ensure elderly people are treated decently," he said.

Ivan Lewis, the Health minister, said the Government would correct the "anomaly" of private care homes being excluded from the Human Rights Act.
Kate Jopling, for Help the Aged, said the report had "lifted the lid on the shameful treatment of our older citizens by health and care services".

Source: The Independent News